Today in Music (Film): The Wisdom of Solomon

Something that happened in music history on this date, and a music documentary that goes with it. Simple.

Like a lot of white suburban rock ‘n’ roll kids, I didn’t know who Solomon Burke was until the Blues Brothers performed his signature song “Everybody Needs Somebody to Love” in their epically over the top 1979 movie, beloved among, well, white suburban rock ‘n’ roll kids. I’ve always taken the prominence of this track in the movie as evidence that the Blues Brothers really were more than a coke-addled comedian’s karaoke rock star fantasy. They actually did want to be popularizers of the classic soul and R&B they semi-comically covered – especially Dan Aykroyd, which buys him a measure of forgiveness for a myriad of sins, Blues Brothers 2000 among them.

Solomon Burke, born on this day in 1940, was variously known through his 50-plus year career as “King Solomon,” “the Bishop of Soul,” and “the Muhammad Ali of soul.” I always thought of Muhammad Ali as the Muhammad Ali of soul, but Burke did vaguely resemble The Greatest in his younger days. In his later years he looked like a cross between Charles Barkley and Cee-Lo Green, corpulent, shave-headed and resplendent in a three-piece suit and Mardi Gras beads as he belted out his signature song from a seated position.

Written by Burke and redolent of the jumped-up, give-the-preacher-some gospel that rang in his bones (he was a born a bishop in the United House of Prayer for All People), the original “Everybody Needs Somebody to Love” was released in 1964. It was a minor hit, reaching No. 58 on the Billboard charts. But not long after it came out, as Bill Wyman recounts in the music documentary Everybody Needs Somebody, Mick Jagger came across a copy and shared it with the Stones, who released a cover in early 1965, giving the track a second life that also saw Wilson Pickett record a version.

Burke would have bigger singles (“Got to Get You Off My Mind” made it to No. 22) but never achieved the pop success of contemporaries like Otis Redding and Sam & Dave, and in the late ’60s he was dropped by Atlantic Records, which had things pretty well covered in the soul department around that time. (Burke recalled walking into the company office one day “and they say ‘Solomon who?’”) Relatively little known but adored by R&B cognoscenti (especially in Britain, judging by the documentary, which also features encomia from Jools Holland and Tom Joens), he continued touring and recording on a variety of labels until his death in October 2010. A few months later Mick Jagger made his first ever live appearance on the Grammys to pay tribute to Burke, singing “Everybody Needs Somebody to Love.”